Samis was born in Ontario in 1873 but grew up on a farm in Ohio. In 1893, Samis joined his father who had moved to Olds, Alberta the previous year. Adorniram taught at the Stoney Indian Reserve at Morley and worked as a correspondent for the Calgary Herald. In 1900 he married Anna McCann and the couple had two children. Samis established a newspaper called the Olds Oracle, but in a 1903 fire the business was destroyed. The following year Samis moved to Calgary where he went into the real estate business and municipal politics. He was first elected to city council in 1907 and during his civic career served three terms as alderman and a number of years as Commissioner. Samis advocated government by commission and municipal ownership of public utilities. The 1919 City of Calgary yearbook credited Samis with helping to establish Calgary’s commission government and commented on his interest in taxation. “Samis never tires of explaining the virtues of ‘land values,’ and the vices of exempting special privileged persons and all corporations from taxation. He believes that if all land were publicly owned and leased to the people, the revenues derived would be sufficient to warrant abolishing our present vicious and expensive methods of tax gathering.”

Samis was a “Baptist, a Liberal and a member of the Canadian Club of Calgary.” He promoted the construction of a railway to Lake Chestermere and in 1912 was a director of the Chestermere Lake Street Railway Company. In 1922 he lost his final bid for commissioner. Plagued by illness and financial problems, Samis left Calgary in December 1922 and moved to Los Angeles where he died in 1942. Samis Road in Crescent Heights is named in his honour.aj_1095